Here are a couple hints so you can puzzle this out, in case you are giving these prayers a try on your own. Remember that ascendens is contemporary with the time of the main verb. Polliceri is deponent, polliceor. Percipio, in the helpful Blaise/Chirat, is revealed to be “receive” especially supernatural gifts. The sicut … ita construction sets up a parallel, “just as X, Y, Z, … so to also in the same way A, B, C.” Both donum and munus (which give is dona and munera) mean “gift”. Munus, however, is a complicated word. In the first place munus is “a charge, office, function”. It also means “a liturgical office” or “liturgy” itself. In the third place it can be “gift, present, offering”. Our English word “gift” is forced to do double duty.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:O God, whose Son while ascending to the heavens deigned to promise the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, grant, we beseech You, that, just as they received the diverse gifts of heavenly teaching just so You may concede to us also spiritual gifts.

The author of the prayer was probably trying to make the prayer more interesting by using both donum and munus to express the concept of “gift”. However, there are subtle lessons to learn from the vocabulary. When we receive something (percipio) as a gift and then come to “perceive” what the content of the gift is, we are obliged to express outwardly both gratitude and also subsequent care for the gift so as to honor the giver. If you receive a beautiful and precious present from someone of high station you do so with humility. You express wonder, gratitude. You examine it carefully. You position it in a place of honor in your home, on display for others to see and to help you remember kindly the giver. You probably will try to learn more about the thing, its history, and so forth. You explain to others the story of how you got it and what it is.

We have received through the teaching of the Apostles and their successors countless gifts. We receive teaching, and laws, and sacraments. The gifts of doctrine, the heavenly teaching, must be received with humility, opened with care, studied and then shared. These gifts are not merely things that can collect dust on a shelf. They are not merely things that can garner respect from the giver when we graciously receive them. They are gifts which can save our souls and save the souls of others when we share them.

It may be that your knowledge of the gifts God has presented to you, even the gifts themselves have become dusty, or perhaps you have relegated them to some place of less honor than they deserve. Perhaps you never display them at all or make them known to others.

It is possible to have received a sacrament such as baptism or confirmation or matrimony or priesthood and nevertheless have that sacrament be “dead” in you, “inactive”, “dormant”. It is one thing to have received sacramental graces, but have the reality of the sacrament be ineffective because you are not in the state of grace and you are neglecting your spiritual life. The sacramental graces from these sacraments can be kick started, as it were, but our cooperation is required. Even the desire for the kick start is a grace offered freely and loving by God.

We are bequeathed of so very many gifts. What we have received imposes upon us also a duty and a special role to play in the Church and in the whole human family.

4 Responses to Saturday after Ascension in the 6th Week of Easter

O God, whose Son ascending into heaven,
deigned to promise the Holy Spirit to his Apostles,
grant, we beseech you,
that just as they received
manifold endowments of heavenly teaching,
you would grant also to us your spiritual gifts.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, forever and ever.

1973 ICEL version:
Father, at your Son’s ascension into heaven
You promised to send the Holy Spirit on your apostles.
You filled them with heavenly wisdom:
fill us also with the gift of your Spirit.

The principal concepts of the Latin collect may appear to be preserved individually. But we see how important for the meaning and unity of a collect it may be to maintain the connective tissue of a single sentence hinged on words of petition or supplication (here, praesta, quaesumus). Again, see what is lost from Don Marco’s fine effort if the “grant, we beseech you” is deleted and the remaining two fragments are converted into single sentences.

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Let us pray…

Grant unto thy Church, we beseech
Thee, O merciful God, that She, being
gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may
be in no wise troubled by attack from her
foes.
O God, who by sin art offended and by
penance pacified, mercifully regard the
prayers of Thy people making supplication
unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of
Thine anger which we deserve for our sins.
Almighty and Everlasting God, in
whose Hand are the power and the
government of every realm: look down upon
and help the Christian people that the heathen
nations who trust in the fierceness of their
own might may be crushed by the power of
thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ,
Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee
in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world
without end. R. Amen.

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“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

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“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

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- C.S. Lewis

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1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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